House of Weaving Songs, Dhaqan Collective (2024) (EMPIRE LINES Live at the Eden Project, Cornwall x Counterpoints Arts, Art Reach)

In this special episode, Fozia Ismail and Ayan Cilmi from the feminist art collective Dhaqan Collective join EMPIRE LINES live at the Eden Project in Cornwall, alongside artists Kaajal Modi and Sovay Berriman, and environmental humanities lecturer Jim Scown, to discuss Somali cultural heritage in the face of climate crises.

In the last few decades, Somali nomadic lives have been endangered by environmental degradation, civil war, and displacement. Created in 1960 from a former British protectorate and an Italian colony, the country collapsed into 30 years of conflict following the overthrow of the military regime of President Siad Barre in 1991. Working with diasporic communities in Bristol, the Dhaqan Collective seek to find ways of building imaginative futures that support Somali people both in the UK and in East Africa. They use everyday materials, from cassette tapes and camel meats, to milk teas, foods, and textiles, to create spaces of community and healing that centre the range of experiences across generations.

Dhaqan discuss their ‘creative ecology’ of work, travelling to contexts from the Southbank Centre in London, to the Isle of Portland in Dorset. We connect with Kaajal Modi, whose practice of ‘embodied listening’ intersperses field recordings from British waterways with migration stories and reflections from marginalised communities. Based in Cornwall, Sovay Berriman mines the politics of place embedded in their work, relating to Cornish nationalisms, and working-class identities. We discuss different perceptions of women, mothers, and elders, crossing from Kaajal’s particular Ugandan Asian community, to conventional arts institutions, exploring questions of collection and restitution. Plus, Jim Scown shares his research at the intersections of soils, science, and literature.

This episode was recorded live at Interweaving Threads of Migration and Climate Justice - a weekend of talks and events at the Eden Project in Cornwall, exploring the power of audio and oral storytelling in cultural preservation - in September 2024: edenproject.com/visit/whats-on/interweaving-threads-of-migration-and-climate-justice

Both Dhaqan Collective’s House of Weaving Songs, and Kaajal Modi’s Songs of the Water, will travel to Journeys Festival 2024 in Leicester from from 11 October 2024, supported by Art Reach and Counterpoints Arts.

For more about b-side Festival 2024, read my article about Mohammad Barrangi in gowithYamo: gowithyamo.com/blog/mohammad-barrangi-b-side-festival

Listen back to the talk from Reclaim Festival 2024 with Serge Attukweh Clottey on the EMPIRE LINES podcast, in the episode on Noko Y3 Dzen (There’s Something in the World (2018-Now): pod.link/1533637675/episode/8093f81c6a2eaaf7589bb73768e2a20c

And catch up on Instagram: instagram.com/p/C3pslhaI_P7/?igsh=bnJ1b2dsNHE5czk1

Find out more about Acts of Gathering with curators Misha Curson and Hannah Hooks in the episode on Learning from Artemisia, Uriel Orlow and Orchestre Jeunes Étoiles des Astres (2019-2020): pod.link/1533637675/episode/0e8ab778b4ce1ad24bc15df3fec5a386

Hear Professor Paul Gilroy live in conversation at The Black Atlantic Symposium in Plymouth (2023): ⁠pod.link/1533637675/episode/90a9fc4efeef69e879b7b77e79659f3f⁠

And for more cassette tapes, hear Dr. Mohamed Shafeeq Karinkurayil sound out migration between post-colonial Kerala and the Arab Gulf, through S. A. Jameel's Dubai Kathu Pattu (Dubai Letter Song) (1977): pod.link/1533637675/episode/417429b5c504842ddbd3c82b07f7b0f8

PRODUCER: Jelena Sofronijevic.

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